Unaddressed challenges in persuasive dieting chatbots

Diet coaching is a behaviour change task which requires lots of interaction with patients. E-health apps gathered lots of interest in research and, recently, chatbots have been leveraged to address this task, with a focus on persuasion to motivate people towards behaviour change. In this paper, we take a look at current approaches in building persuasive dieting chatbots and expose a number of major unsolved challenges. We motivate them with evidence from previous work and show that current chatbots don’t approach certain scenarios properly, hence limiting their communication and persuasion capabilities.